The present invention provides a tactical-gear auxiliary equipment rail-mounting system apparatus and method that allows connection of a variety of tactical gear, such as gun stocks, camera supports, sights and rangefinders, grips, and clamps, in field-interchangeable configurations.
The Weaver rail mount was a small-arms manufacturer's apparatus meant to facilitate the removable mounting of telescopic sights on rifles while ensuring proper alignment. With some modifications, the Weaver rail was adopted as a U.S. military standard, the MIL-STD-1913 rail, also known as Picatinny rail, Standardization Agreement (STANAG) 2324 rail, or tactical rail. The NATO Accessory Rail (NAR), also known as Standardization Agreement (STANAG) 4694 rail, is another, very closely related and essentially interchangeable standard, using essentially the same dimensions stated in metric units.
The Picatinny rail provides a standard mounting platform for small arms—rifles and pistols—and consists of rails with angled surfaces for alignment and attachment, and regularly spaced transverse slots allowing screws, bolts, or other connectors to pass underneath the object being mounted. Use of the Picatinny rail is no longer limited to telescopic sights, but also includes mounting auxiliary equipment such as night vision devices, reflex sights, laser aiming modules, tactical lights, cameras, fore-grips, bipods, and bayonets to small arms in both military and non-military uses.
A large and growing amount of auxiliary equipment using the Picatinny-rail system now exists. Just one continuous unit of Picatinny rail is unlikely to be adequate to properly mount all of the auxiliary equipment, because of a lack of total mounting area and because in-line mounting causes some equipment to be ahead or behind other equipment along the line of fire. Even where equipment can be fit onto a single rail by clever arrangement, that clever arrangement is likely to cause complications if any reconfiguration is later needed in the field. Also, some auxiliary equipment is better mounted at some angle to the line of fire.
In some circumstances, only the auxiliary equipment is needed, without any rifle or pistol, such as with cameras, spotting scopes, rangefinders, remotely located equipment, and decoy equipment. Also, in some circumstances, it is not possible or proper to point a firearm toward an object of interest just for the sake of getting a photograph, measurement, or reading. In such circumstances, mounting to Picatinny rails that are not attached to a firearm, but that still provide the properly aligned mounting surfaces, and still allow for the use of stocks, grips, bipods, and the like, is desirable.
There is a need for a rail-mounting system, utilizing the Picatinny-rail standard, that provides a greater amount of mounting area and a variety of mounting-surface orientations, for small-arms and non-firearm tactical gear auxiliary equipment.